Critics often call American culture youth obsessed. Plastic surgery, medicine, fashion, the entertainment industry and cosmetics focus on youth and beauty - where youthfulness remains the goal for many, regardless of cost.
I think this assessment is misguided, however. In fact, our nation's obsession rests on just the opposite: aging, adulthood and death. It is not actually the youth of the nation that concerns many; it's the narcissistic desire to look, feel and act young that remains the central focus.
Look at Viagra, for instance. While erectile dysfunction may be a problematic circumstance in a man's twenties, it's a natural occurrence of life in his sixties and seventies.
Menopause, a natural event in female aging, is treated similarly as a disease in need of a cure. The pharmaceutical industry, seeking to fill every niche and creating problems where none exist, offers hormone therapies to heal this alleged sickness. Many of these therapies have been linked to cancer. Perhaps letting biology run its natural course is beneficial, if not altogether sound.
Additionally, abortion caste in this light is something I will never fully understand. At one time, societies looked at pregnancy as a blessing, not an impasse to career and financial security. The Guttmacher Institute reports that about 50 percent of pregnancies are unplanned, implying that a personal life strategy did not include bringing a new generation into existence.
This nihilistic fixation on aging does not limit itself to biology, it exists in the financial world as well. It is not uncommon to see newspaper articles, magazines and television programs offering financial retirement strategies for people in their twenties. While saving for a rainy day is never a bad idea, securing financial strength for retirement at the expense of having a life while young is very much a bad idea. For what would be the point? Are we really to arrive at old age, having wasted our lives saving to be elderly?
The real financial issue seems to be Social Security. It's unfortunate, but a raw deal looms on the horizon for baby boomers. Having paid into the system their entire lives, Social Security might be severely limited, if not altogether absent, for many as Boomers enter retirement in the next few years. The system was never designed to handle this many ab one time. Since ensuing generations make less money as the boomers made at comparable ages, robbing the young to pay for retirement supplements is flat out wrong.
We must be the only culture in human history where the focus has shifted from securing and enabling younger generations to benefit the financial security of older ones. How long can such a society sustain its existence?
I think we should have a youth obsessed culture - not the narcissistic youthful infatuation that exists today, but a culture that puts all of its energy into developing the young. Bringing forth and nurturing the next generation is what propels organisms forward. Can you imagine a species of birds where some of the adult members push their eggs out of the nest because the soon-to-hatch chicks might impede them from worm foraging? What if these same adult birds started constructing nests for their last years of life at the expense of providing shelter for the young?
For all of our supposed intelligence, we must be the stupidest species on the planet. We sacrifice the well-being of the young and highlight late middle age as the pinnacle of existence.
As George Carlin once said: we are an "evolutionary cul-de-sac." In the very least, the culture of the West has arrived at such a dead end.
Write to Chris atcaflook@bsu.edu
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